It's a Nice Day For a... Biscuit Challenge

It’s Friday. It’s been a week of exceptional hard work from the Crumpled Dogs. We’ve come to the end of a big project, sweated through another heatwave, said goodbye to one of our colleagues and had a brand-new outdoor bench-and-table set delivered (for lunch breaks and those mid-afternoon meetings when the studio’s room temperature’s gone from "warm" to "I can’t remember what air feels like").

What better way to christen the new picnic table and round off a hectic week than with a long-awaited, meticulously-planned, team-building bit of Friday fun in the form of a Custard Cream challenge?

Born of an ongoing feud between Custard Cream purists and those who really couldn’t tell the difference either way, the team have been gathering different brands of the biscuit over the last few months, spanning in range from Sainsbury’s Basics, to the somewhat swankier McVities’ own.

With his natural affinity for charts and organisation, our digital producer Clive put together a scorecard with the most important, agreed-upon elements that (apparently…) make a Custard Cream so distinct; taste, texture, and overall quality. Printouts were provided, pens were handed out, and the blind taste test could begin.

Some of us who don’t claim to be experienced Custard Cream aficionados were dubious that there could be any noticeable difference between the ten (ten!) different types of the same biscuit; the rest insisted there absolutely was. The result, gathered from our careful data collection, was somewhere in the middle – most Custard Creams, as it turns out, are pretty much the same, yet still a victor emerged; crisp-textured, full-flavoured, and filled-right-to-the-edges...

So if you’ve ever stood in the supermarket, looking lost as you stare blankly into the biscuit aisle wondering whether you should choose one brand or another, wonder no more, as we have the answers….

and the winner is... the Co-Op!

Questions have been answered and the Custard Cream feud can be laid to rest. Broken pieces of biscuit are gathered in a bowl, all brands mixed together, no longer segregated, harmoniously existing under the inclusive umbrella of “leftover Custard Creams no-one wants,” and the team is sufficiently sugared-up and ready to embark on the next project.

And if we can be serious about a bit of silliness for a moment; after a tough period of hard work, and on a day when the sun is shining as it is today, a bit of harmless, creative, (tasty) fun is a brilliant way to lift the mood, bond the troops and get everyone away from their desks for a moment for a breather – ready to finish the week on a high.